More Glue Tools products are becoming GPU enabled, as each version is released. Most of the these packages will allow you to choose between CPU rendering, or GPU rendering. In most cases, GPU rendering is very desirable as it is significantly faster than CPU rendering.

Not all Macintosh models can use GPU rendering however. In some cases, you will need to upgrade your version of MacOSX. But in other cases, you may have to use a more powerful card or system. Below is a list of known cards that work, and don't work.

Support Graphics Cards:

NVidia Quadro 4000 (MacOSX 10.7.5 and later)

ATI Radeon HD 5870 (MacOSX 10.7 and later)

ATI Radeon HD 48xx (MacOSX 10.7 and later)

NVidia GTX 285 (MacOSX 10.6.8)

NVidia GeForce 9400M (MacOSX 10.7 and later)

All iMac systems with Thunderbolt

All MacBook Pro models with Thunderbolt

Unsupported (incompatible) Graphics Cards:

Intel Integrated HD Graphics 4000

Intel Integrated HD Graphics 3000

If you have a graphics card that is not on this list, please let us know if you are able to work (or not) with our software.

]]>Most files import into Final Cut Pro 7 without any issues.

However, some files that were created using a Windows NT/XP/Vista/7 OS, will often have a set of "Permissions" attached. These permissions are called "ACLs" or Access Control Lists. In many cases, these ACLs are mostly ignored, with the exception of FCP7. If FCP7 sees these permissions, it will treat these files as being "Offline". To fix the problem, you need to remove (or "strip") these permissions from the file. This will not harm the file at all.

Attached is an AppleScript droplet that you can download and use. Simply drag and drop your file onto the Droplet, and the ACLs will be removed.

If you have an existing automated workflow, you can also use the following Unix command on your Macintosh, to remove the ACLs as well:

xattr -d com.apple.FinderInfo <path to file>

Enjoy!

]]>Unfortunately there is no "Magic Number" for rendering time. Every system is set up differently. Every software package is different. And with QuickTime, a number of packages are in the mix, not just my software tools.

All of the Glue Tools Toolkits can certainly do the job very quickly. Once installed, any application that can export ProRes should "just work".

There are some limiting factors:

- The Glue Tools Toolkits will create the imagery, ProRes Compresses the imagery. Both steps have to happen on each and every frame.

- ProRes (and every other compression codec) is generally CPU driven. The Glue Tools packages are GPU based and are generally really fast.

- The Quality Settings in the Glue Tools Package, as well as the settings in the compression package will determine the speed, as well.

In a nutshell, I can tell you that our Toolkits are able to playback footage real time on high end machines. On laptops using medium quality render modes, playback works extremely well. The Glue Tools Toolkit is going to be able to render frames far faster than ProRes can encode them.

Sorry that I can’t provide you a “number”. But as you can see above, how much time it takes, will vary from system to system.

Having said that, you can download a demo and try it yourself. Be sure to enable “GT Hybrid A” (if using RAW packages) as the debayer, and select GPU mode for OpenCL. Then set up your render job in QuickTime Player 7 or Compressor 4.

This will give you an excellent idea as to how much time it will take for your system to render a shot.

Please ask questions!

bob.

]]>If you are unable to import image sequeneces, or, when you import a sequence and only the first frame loads, it is possible that the file nameing convention is causing the problem.

A filenaming convention is simply "how you name your files". By altering this, you should be able to fix the problem.

The support file naming convention is as follows:

The frame number for your sequence *must* be the last element before the file extention.

myshot.00000.dpxmyshot.00000.ari

or

000000.dpx000000.ari

The separator between the "root" part of a filename and the frame numbers can only be a "." or a "_".

myshot_00000.dpxmyshot_00000.ari

or

myshot.00000.dpxmyshot.00000.ari

The software also requires a digit padding of 4 to 8 numbers. (Digit padding is "How many digits are in the frame number portion of the file name.")ie:myshot.0000.dpx up to myshot.00000000.dpxmyshot.0000.ari up to myshot.00000000.ari

To rename your files on your Mac, you should consider tools such as "A Better Finder Rename"or "Rename for Mac" or "Renamer". You can google search these really easily.

bob.

]]>Hi Everyone,

As you may have learned, QuickTime Player X is increasingly moving away from supporting Legacy QuickTime tools.

Fortunately, you can still use QuickTime Player 7 to continue to use our (and other 3rd party) plugins.

To download and install QuickTime Player 7, go to the webpage below and follow the installation instructions.